A backwash of death and body's decay,
The soul—once dwelt within me—is no more.
In life-death script's passably long play,
I could not—I don't know why—reach the shore.
I lie naked now with many others,
Forgetting caste, colour, creed, polity;
Confronting all weather with no druthers,
Pushed towards a preset equality.
Isn't there, in my core, an inner strength?
There's a truth of perseverance of life;
There is, in me, an endless breadth and length
Of forgone pains of existential strife.
Am I the monarch of this breathless deep,
Or just a puppet death has put to sleep?
The Sparrow
by Positive Mark
Torch-burnt quills never offer apology.
Scorched earth policies revive a dead polity.
Force fed intellects give rise to economy.
Those who don’t fit, I advise you to follow me.
First, let’s pay homage to walls that were climbed.
Put in the time, and you’ll shine like Coach Prime.
Kill or be killed at the devil’s insistence.
If you lack fortitude, strike from a distance.
Fiery orators once fit the bill.
Now, they’re a hallowed list of confirmed kills.
Dead at the podium.
Dead on the balcony.
Genocide rhymes have become the new alchemy.
Armies of men show their butt on the street.
Reeks of an old auction, selling Black meat.
Honest comedians cancelled for jokes.
This is the new definition of woke.
Now higher frequency thought has been shattered.
Shirts weren’t printed when Black lives still mattered.
No reparations for cultural rape.
Modern day poets ain’t bustin’ a grape.
Torches on quills that were once burning arrows.
Who watches you, when his eye’s on the sparrow?
In 1963, Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
What he asked for should not have been a far reach.
Dr. King was rather unique
And boy did he like to speak
He spoke on equality and racism
And spread his message through activism
He was one of the most prominent activists during the Civil Rights Movement.
He was hoping for enlightenment
He led nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience
Based on his years of experience
Dr. King was against discrimination and Jim Crow laws
They didn’t align with his cause
For this, the FBI deemed him a radical
That just wasn’t practical
He won a Nobel Peace Prize for combatting racial inequality
A major step for civil rights in American polity
In 1968, Martin Luther King met his demise
His assassination led some to theorize
Would he be surprised to how little we have come
Or would he be thankful for improving equality some
What the world needs today is frivolity
Benign silliness of the highest quality,
Mixed in with various country’s polity
Will clearly enhance the planet’s jollity.
FIRST PLACE WINNER
"BEST MONORHYME" Poetry Contest
written July 4, 2021
The tirade of the tyrant
Has subdued the trident
Gloating over the viceroy
It's the blood and sweat of
victory.
The subdued voice of defeat
Veiled in unapologetic defiance
Shedding secret tears of what could
have been?
What would have been in the hood
It's the defeat drenched in blood and
sweat.
The table is set for dinner,
Choice meats, mutton, chicken beef....
This is a parade of victory for the price
Of blood and sweat of the masses.
The meat is gorging on, the flesh is stuck between the teeth
A pain in the mouth, transversing the whole
polity
The bodies of the dead nationals crushed
A vivid reminder of the price of victory
Of shed blood and sweat.
(Written on the 15th April 2015, after the 2015 Nigerian Presidential elections)
True, a Myth-and-a-half ever since dim Antiquity
“Breathes there the Man with Soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said
This is my own, my Native Land”
True, a myth-and-a-half ever since dim antiquity
Who breeds and holds the brood in binding sanctity
Isn’t s/he who sows and let grow blood ties in family
Don’t leaders all use the ruse of saluting country
La Patrie is never the suffering Peoples’ victory
They lay their lives down for their leaders’ greater glory
The plot of land’s where the Soul ignites anonymity
In the au-delà is not country mere pure vanity
Leaders lay wreathes at monuments for tv publicity
Upstarts win lone battle or two through freakish strategy
And let expanding borders be besieged by many enemy
Yet end-up somehow by losing the Imperial Army
Shouldn’t he who seeks to foist himself on a polity
Be required to pass the test of Ego-immunity
No vaccination nor re-inoculation would be free
From an overdose of megalomaniac frenzy
© T. Wignesan –Paris, April 9, 2021
The hood is foregone.
Into the past, of fired crucifixes upon front lawns.
The day has begun, a new dawn.
Bare faced, in the sun's illumination.
Guised within the roles that make a nation.
Spread throughout vital occupations.
Where darkened communities suffer from the
bleached cohorts occupation.
From tainted patrols roaming free on the range
with no scrutiny.
To deliver captives to like minded counselors
and judiciary.
As aesculapian institutions dispense succor to
the most monetary.
In conjunction with polity, where signed documentation
continues urban poverty.
Strengthened by miseducation from chameleon educators,
educated with an educational degree.
Conjoined in unity of conspiracy, waltzing through the
capital of democracy.
The confederates state their supremacy optically.
It is time for the rolling back of sleeves, to fight
the good fight with bravery.
Steadfast, and observe closely.
For the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, as evil stands
before you and me.
THE OCCURRENCE
WERE SHE FOUND REASON
TO PROVOKE HIM INTO ANGER
WARN THESE PEOPLE
THAT HIS FURY IS THAT OF
HER MAKINGS
ABSENCE OF BEHAVIOR
TO REMAIN UNDISTURBED
AND POLITY FINDING AWAY
TO REMOVE HIMSELF FROM
THAT WHICH ANGERS HIM
SHE STIRS UP STRIFE
TO CAUSE ANGER
SHE REVEALS IN
INSTRUCTION OF THOSE
WHO SHE MAKES PART OF
HER DEVANICE
TO SIDE WITH HER AS FAVOR
SHE IS AS VILE AS HIM WHO
SHE CAUSES TO BE
ANGRY
GIVE NO OPPORTUNITY TO THIS SATAN
AS SHE MIGHT FIND WAYS
TO CAUSE YOU ANGERED
SHE IS SATAN
AND AS SATAN SHE SHALL HAVE
YOU RIVALED AND DIVIDED
SEPARATE FROM THOSE WHO WOULD
BE MORE SUITABLE TO
WHAT IS EXPECTED OF THEM
SHE SHALL PROFEIT IN YOUR ABSENCE
MIGHT YOU FIND ONE WHO WISHES
TO PURSUE WEALTH TOGETHER
IN THE WAY OF LABOR
A blade of grass
produces health
in annual balancing equivalence
to consuming soil and sun's wealth.
A human child
given Earth's sufficiencies,
produces robust health
by consuming soil and sun's captures
and re-investing wealth
out into this child's multiculturing exterior.
A wise humane Elder
given Earth's sufficiencies
and given trust of responsible authority
by a democratically cooperative polity,
also aspires to produce healthy outcomes
within that community
in balancing proportion
through consuming soil and sun's captured resources,
re-invested in proportion
to this year's metabolic wealth,
and to last year's producer reimbursements,
nurturing future ecosystemic health,
and to each next generation's producers,
nurtured by this wise care
of Earth's wealthiest Elders.
A wise, and yet child-like, blade
consumes economic health
to produce cooperatively synergetic political wealth.
We live a life of ambiguity.
We sat, "Value for life", yet death abounds.
Our leaders visit lands of polity
painful to all, yet make most benign sounds
of friendship and we shuck and jive a bit,
but convince ourselves that profitable
mutual ends can lead to a lamp lit
once to freedom, but now hardly able
to be seen in the smog of industry
and sweat of workers without any choice.
Men and women that are taken away
to lonely deaths if they hazard a voice
in the mildest kinds of criticism.
Our guilt lost in late show witticism.
He shocks me. Only a day or so ago
I'm sure I didn't look like that.
I try to part the few thin strands
of hair up top, the patriarchs before me
saw on their own sluggish heads
not long ago--I was not so sure that I
would always wish them peaceful rest;
it wasn't my idea!
But I have joined them now; this role
of wisdom in a geezer doesn't
always fit--and no one falls in love
with old ideas when the new ones
are in vogue. Respect and polity
lacked the concern of youth
that I knew 60 years ago.
'Twas ever thus? Perhaps. I never
long for olden days. I would, however
like to have us all just listen
to each other, stow the fear
and tempest in those heads
that sleepily look back at us each morning,
then forgive them, aged and young,
of all our doubts, for hoary heads alone
are not the arbiters of peace or joy.
It is every mother's son
indeed in saecula and saeculorum, say:
Amen, again Amen.
~
Sat alone and stark on a brown chair,
Not even knowing what to do with,
Simon and Garfunkel’s I Am A Rock,
Just an isolated island heavy as death.
I didn’t even want to be there cheering,
Adding to the multitude of the church,
But taught that our family had its own,
Morality, polity and principles, I sank.
Not my fault if I have read the Bible,
That literary glory sprawled in canopy;
Ignore me if I understand the gospels,
In a way that’s not at all evangelical.
Less of your begging oh Christian,
Chat about universities for a time;
The ice-age has been, rivers remain,
Shunning stains the life of the free.
Quietly, I feel they used my disability,
Discriminating since I could not walk,
Mingle at the end of the service politely,
Relinquishing my caring spirit known.
I needed met, befriended by someone,
Who’d actively remove or assimilate me,
With a carer from the state or school,
To prevent me from a mental illness.
Just sat by yourself, just as a sore thumb,
Tested afterwards to assert you’d coped,
Because after all, that would be god’s will,
For your essential child development.
5th November 2015
A dynast in the storm-razed
polity will ask-
for a pardon.
By choice there was
no suicide. You will
eat the clouds one day.
Taking the brunt,-
living near the sea of
people, a window goes shut.
Curtly, with
levitation, the wind
twists, one and everybody.
An owl tattoo, will
tell it all. The hurricane
has reached your door.
Aftermath was a
conspiracy of silence.
Every one was speaking of landfall.
Satish Verma
A man who does not know his history
Will never know the path to his future
A man is no better than a beast
If his intelligence does not distinguish him from another creature
One thousand years before Hanno came to Africa
We lived in Tabulas Ras
Our science was not recorded and so was our culture
We cared for very little
And left to Providence
To determine our future
Doing very little to develop ourselves
We left it for our other brothers
Up north
And still relied on the ideas and science which they bought
History began to creep slowly
Through a chain of events
And occurrences was not preserved
As the events present
History of man
Will enable him learn
His wrong from his right
As imperial entities spread
From the left to the right
As a great power began to spread her imperial wings
Which is now widen spreading wide and thin
Events in history began to spin
Western hegemony dominated the global polity
African contribution is a sad apology
But is not too late for redemption
We can still think
And pay more attention to nature
And the slightest wink
For a moonshine,
there was no moon.
There was no moon
for a moonshine.
It starts a tenuous
soliloquy, raising a –
slew of questions.
Slew of questions will
evoke a mixed response.
Were you ready for
a sleepover at the shrine
to watch the St. Vitus’s dance.
It was leaking at night
from the corner of eyes.
Unaging was the secret
of polity. Are you in ?
Satish Verma
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